Case Studies

Transport - VAMPIRE - A Railway Vehicle Modelling Package

AEAT Rail - Vampire Web Site

VAMPIRE is a world leading package for modelling railway vehicles. It is used around the world by consultants, rolling-stock designers, engineers and derailment investigators to accurately model and predict railway vehicle behaviour.

ID Computing Limited has played a key role in developing the latest version of this product - Vampire Pro 2005. Vampire Pro features a new user-friendly interface for designing and building vehicle models called the Interactive Vehicle Builder. ID Computing designed and coded this new feature as well as enhancing the underlying analysis code.

Transport - Railway Diesel Engine Monitoring

Failures of railway diesel engines in service are costly. This is not only due to having to recover the vehicle and pay any fines for disrupting other services, but also the lost revenue-earning time due to lengthy repairs.

Fortunately, many faults are not 'out of the blue', but are the final stage after a worsening of key engine parameters over a long time. By monitoring key parameters such as oil temperatures, pressures, cylinder temperatures and current, early symptoms of a fault can be detected, notified and acted upon during routine maintenance periods.

This on-board engine monitoring system uses GPS (satellite navigation) technology and mobile communications to report problems to a PC in the maintenance depot. The data recorded by the system can also be remotely downloaded periodically to a central database where it is available for further analysis.

Transport - Railway Track Recording Coach

Track needs to monitored routinely to detect worn sections that need replacing or areas that need underlying ballast repacking to maintain the correct track profile both on the straight and round canted curves.

Bearing in mind how many miles of track in the UK there are and the disruption to services if it was measured manually, it is only natural to develop a track recording coach that can measure and analyse the track at normal service running speeds.

This on-board system uses laser profiling to measure the shape of the rail-head and on-board gyroscopes and accelerometers to monitor all apsects of the motion of the coach. All these parameters are digitally filtered and combined using complex formulae in real-time to determine the full track geometry which is available for live plotting and storing to disk. This takes place eight times a metre at over 160kph.

Security - Central Station Software

A national UK supermarket chain runs its own alarm receiving centre for all of its stores. The alarm receiving centre acts as a first point of call to filter out false alarms to the emergency services. Besides the obvious intruder detection and fire alarms it also receives 'notification' messages throughout the trading day that record activity in the cash offices or the opening and closing times.

This system receives its alarms via a bank of ISDN lines and/or IP. The alarms are processed, prioritised and stored in a database where the alarm receiving centre operators can jointly access the information. Urgent alarms are highlighted for immeditate action with a local sounder. This system can handle over 15000 messages a day.

Home - Home Automation System

This system integrates home security, heating and lighting and can be accessed from a simple web browser.

Individual heating profiles can be assigned to each room independently for each day of the week. Mood lighting settings can be created and even curtains can be drawn automatically when it gets dark.

The system has a built in password protected web server so all aspects of the system can be monitored and controlled from a PC. With an 'always on' broadband connection there is the possibility of checking up on your home from anywhere in the world.